A provenance sandwich best approximates the journey of Austrian Jewish collector Richard Neumann’s masterpieces: The museum giveth, and it taketh away. Decades later, compelled by law, it giveth back.
Neumann (1879-1959) came of connoisseurial age as Vienna’s royal collections (particularly Habsburg ones) opened to the public. But the very arts institutions that shaped the young textile manufacturer’s aesthetic taste—to whom he lent works and with whose leadership he had close relationships—subsequently facilitated Nazi theft of his art. He and his heirs sought restitution for decades, with the most recent work returned to Neumann descendents last November.
My artnet article on the Worcester Art Museum’s exhibit “What the Nazis Stole from Richard Neumann (and the search to get it back)” (through Jan. 16, 2022) tells the story of Neumann and his collection, which Vienna documented in 1921 and found 28 works it designated “landmarks.”
I focus in large part on the fall from grace, so to speak, of key works in Neumann’s collection. A century ago, some of these artists were much better known, while they are less familiar to us today, even as they continue to hang on walls of important collections in America and of course in Europe. The story of this collection reminds us that when we use a phrase like “Old Masters,” we ought to build quite a bit of elasticity and porous edges into our definition.
The piece draws on interviews with Claire Whitner, the Worcester museum’s director of curatorial affairs, and Gary Vikan, who directed Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum from 1994 until 2013 and is author of the 2020 book The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death. Here, again, is the link to my artnet piece, titled “500 Years Ago, These Artists Were Household Names. Here’s What Their Fall From Favor Suggests About the Vagaries of Fame.”
The artnet piece is strong--and certainly warrants the huge response (381K?). In this teaser RS piece above, clever phrase ". . . we ought to build quite a bit of elasticity and porous edges into our definition."